Sphero Spiderman Lets You Banter With The Witty Web-Slinger

June 19, 2017

It’s not as sophisticated as either their BB-8 or Ultimate Lightning McQueen toys. For younger kids, though, the Sphero Spiderman just might be the most interesting toy in the outfit’s fleet of adorable robots, giving them quite a unique way of playing with Marvel’s favorite web-slinger.

Unlike Sphero’s other toy robots, this one isn’t designed to look adorable running all over the house. Instead, it stays pretty much stationary, with fixed legs and arms that can’t really do anything except rotate along the shoulders. So what makes it any more fun than a regular Spiderman toy?

For one, the Sphero Spiderman comes with animated eyes, allowing it to be a whole lot more expressive than any previous toy of the beloved web-head. It comes with an onboard AI that can interact with kids in Spidey’s trademark witty manner, as well as a motion detector that allows it to recognize when people pass by and react with a, hopefully, appropriate wisecrack. Aside from engaging in banter, the toy can also tell interactive stories, which play out like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, essentially making you his sidekick in the story.

Features include a companion app (iOS and Android), a silicone body that should handle rough play, a built-in mic-and-speaker, and a battery rated at over two hours of play time on a full charge. Unlike most modern AI systems, the toy keeps the interactions completely local, so at no point will the children’s information ever be uploaded to the cloud.

3 Responses

I like the whole Spiderman series and all, but I am really not that into techie toys like this. The fact that Sphero Spiderman can walk and interact with kids is a little creepy to me. I am going to sound super old when I say this but when I was a kid we didn’t have toys like this. You went outside or in the basement toy room and used your imagination. Even though times have changed and I am older now, I know for a fact that my parent still wouldn’t get me something like this and I probably wouldn’t get my kids something like this either. I think it is super important for kids to develop their creativity at a young age and this toy goes too far to me.

This would be fun to get to mess with my cat. Unfortunately he’d probably shred Sphero Spiderman when I was gone too work. The animated eyes can make him visually react, and had an app too. This is the toy robot that would be just as much fun for parents as it would be for kids.

It’s good they are keeping the information locally for children’s privacy reasons, but it’s be nice to have a feature where it could use a combined cloud feedback like Apple Siri does. Although not as secure, it would allow Spiderman to learn and adapt new phrases and software updates like Siri does. Imagine Spiderman learning your name, or even your dogs name, and then start saying high to them when they hear their voice.

I would like this to be as helpful as Amazon Echo, but in this baby Spiderman form. But this is designed to be more entertaining and less of a tool.

It’s a tradeoff. Do you want more options like Siri and Alexa, or do you want to ensure privacy? With a toy aimed primary at kids it is a good thing they chose the route they did, or else they would have potentially opened themselves up to bad media from tech-illiterate parents criticizing them.

I would have assumed that the Edward Snowden leaks would have shown the general public out our perceived “privacy” with tech products is largely just an illusion, but we’ve seen the vast majority of the general public filled with apathy towards the spying of American Citizens by the intelligence communities.

If the Spiderman had the smarter cloud-based intelligence like Amazon Alexa, then it’d be probable that this little Spiderman could open up your family to not only potential spying, but also hackers. It’s a scary World we live in when you have to consider how much a kids toy could spy on your family.